UK utility data integration: overcoming schematic heterogeneity

In this paper we discuss syntactic, semantic and schematic issues which inhibit the integration of utility data in the UK. We then focus on the techniques employed within the VISTA project to overcome schematic heterogeneity. A Global Schema based architecture is employed. Although automated approaches to Global Schema definition were attempted the heterogeneities of the sector were too great. A manual approach to Global Schema definition was employed. The techniques used to define and subsequently map source utility data models to this schema are discussed in detail. In order to ensure a coherent integrated model, sub and cross domain validation issues are then highlighted. Finally the proposed framework and data flow for schematic integration is introduced

Ontology mapping: the state of the art

Ontology mapping is seen as a solution provider in today's landscape of ontology research. As the number of ontologies that are made publicly available and accessible on the Web increases steadily, so does the need for applications to use them. A single ontology is no longer enough to support the tasks envisaged by a distributed environment like the Semantic Web. Multiple ontologies need to be accessed from several applications. Mapping could provide a common layer from which several ontologies could be accessed and hence could exchange information in semantically sound manners. Developing such mapping has beeb the focus of a variety of works originating from diverse communities over a number of years. In this article we comprehensively review and present these works. We also provide insights on the pragmatics of ontology mapping and elaborate on a theoretical approach for defining ontology mapping

Designing Improved Sediment Transport Visualizations

Monitoring, or more commonly, modeling of sediment transport in the coastal environment is a critical task with relevance to coastline stability, beach erosion, tracking environmental contaminants, and safety of navigation. Increased intensity and regularity of storms such as Superstorm Sandy heighten the importance of our understanding of sediment transport processes. A weakness of current modeling capabilities is the ability to easily visualize the result in an intuitive manner. Many of the available visualization software packages display only a single variable at once, usually as a two-dimensional, plan-view cross-section. With such limited display capabilities, sophisticated 3D models are undermined in both the interpretation of results and dissemination of information to the public. Here we explore a subset of existing modeling capabilities (specifically, modeling scour around man-made structures) and visualization solutions, examine their shortcomings and present a design for a 4D visualization for sediment transport studies that is based on perceptually-focused data visualization research and recent and ongoing developments in multivariate displays. Vector and scalar fields are co-displayed, yet kept independently identifiable utilizing human perception\u27s separation of color, texture, and motion. Bathymetry, sediment grain-size distribution, and forcing hydrodynamics are a subset of the variables investigated for simultaneous representation. Direct interaction with field data is tested to support rapid validation of sediment transport model results. Our goal is a tight integration of both simulated data and real world observations to support analysis and simulation of the impact of major sediment transport events such as hurricanes. We unite modeled results and field observations within a geodatabase designed as an application schema of the Arc Marine Data Model. Our real-world focus is on the Redbird Artificial Reef Site, roughly 18 nautical miles offshor- Delaware Bay, Delaware, where repeated surveys have identified active scour and bedform migration in 27 m water depth amongst the more than 900 deliberately sunken subway cars and vessels. Coincidently collected high-resolution multibeam bathymetry, backscatter, and side-scan sonar data from surface and autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) systems along with complementary sub-bottom, grab sample, bottom imagery, and wave and current (via ADCP) datasets provide the basis for analysis. This site is particularly attractive due to overlap with the Delaware Bay Operational Forecast System (DBOFS), a model that provides historical and forecast oceanographic data that can be tested in hindcast against significant changes observed at the site during Superstorm Sandy and in predicting future changes through small-scale modeling around the individual reef objects

Integrating E-Commerce and Data Mining: Architecture and Challenges

We show that the e-commerce domain can provide all the right ingredients for successful data mining and claim that it is a killer domain for data mining. We describe an integrated architecture, based on our expe-rience at Blue Martini Software, for supporting this integration. The architecture can dramatically reduce the pre-processing, cleaning, and data understanding effort often documented to take 80% of the time in knowledge discovery projects. We emphasize the need for data collection at the application server layer (not the web server) in order to support logging of data and metadata that is essential to the discovery process. We describe the data transformation bridges required from the transaction processing systems and customer event streams (e.g., clickstreams) to the data warehouse. We detail the mining workbench, which needs to provide multiple views of the data through reporting, data mining algorithms, visualization, and OLAP. We con-clude with a set of challenges.Comment: KDD workshop: WebKDD 200

Using Ontologies for the Design of Data Warehouses

Obtaining an implementation of a data warehouse is a complex task that forces designers to acquire wide knowledge of the domain, thus requiring a high level of expertise and becoming it a prone-to-fail task. Based on our experience, we have detected a set of situations we have faced up with in real-world projects in which we believe that the use of ontologies will improve several aspects of the design of data warehouses. The aim of this article is to describe several shortcomings of current data warehouse design approaches and discuss the benefit of using ontologies to overcome them. This work is a starting point for discussing the convenience of using ontologies in data warehouse design.Comment: 15 pages, 2 figure

BSML: A Binding Schema Markup Language for Data Interchange in Problem Solving Environments (PSEs)

We describe a binding schema markup language (BSML) for describing data interchange between scientific codes. Such a facility is an important constituent of scientific problem solving environments (PSEs). BSML is designed to integrate with a PSE or application composition system that views model specification and execution as a problem of managing semistructured data. The data interchange problem is addressed by three techniques for processing semistructured data: validation, binding, and conversion. We present BSML and describe its application to a PSE for wireless communications system design

Four Lessons in Versatility or How Query Languages Adapt to the Web

Exposing not only human-centered information, but machine-processable data on the Web is one of the commonalities of recent Web trends. It has enabled a new kind of applications and businesses where the data is used in ways not foreseen by the data providers. Yet this exposition has fractured the Web into islands of data, each in different Web formats: Some providers choose XML, others RDF, again others JSON or OWL, for their data, even in similar domains. This fracturing stifles innovation as application builders have to cope not only with one Web stack (e.g., XML technology) but with several ones, each of considerable complexity. With Xcerpt we have developed a rule- and pattern based query language that aims to give shield application builders from much of this complexity: In a single query language XML and RDF data can be accessed, processed, combined, and re-published. Though the need for combined access to XML and RDF data has been recognized in previous work (including the W3C’s GRDDL), our approach differs in four main aspects: (1) We provide a single language (rather than two separate or embedded languages), thus minimizing the conceptual overhead of dealing with disparate data formats. (2) Both the declarative (logic-based) and the operational semantics are unified in that they apply for querying XML and RDF in the same way. (3) We show that the resulting query language can be implemented reusing traditional database technology, if desirable. Nevertheless, we also give a unified evaluation approach based on interval labelings of graphs that is at least as fast as existing approaches for tree-shaped XML data, yet provides linear time and space querying also for many RDF graphs. We believe that Web query languages are the right tool for declarative data access in Web applications and that Xcerpt is a significant step towards a more convenient, yet highly efficient data access in a “Web of Data”

Automated syntactic mediation for Web service integration

As the Web Services and Grid community adopt Semantic Web technology, we observe a shift towards higher-level workflow composition and service discovery practices. While this provides excellent functionality to non-expert users, more sophisticated middleware is required to hide the details of service invocation and service integration. An investigation of a common Bioinformatics use case reveals that the execution of high-level workflow designs requires additional processing to harmonise syntactically incompatible service interfaces. In this paper, we present an architecture to support the automatic reconciliation of data formats in such Web Service worklflows. The mediation of data is driven by ontologies that encapsulate the information contained in heterogeneous data structures supplying a common, conceptual data representation. Data conversion is carried out by a Configurable Mediator component, consuming mappings between \xml schemas and \owl ontologies. We describe our system and give examples of our mapping language against the background of a Bioinformatics use case